Abstract Summary
Public interest in criminal offenders and the techniques used to apprehend them has grown dramatically. No area of criminal scientific investigation is exempt, including forensic linguistics (FL). Using official guidelines of FL societies and interview material from FL police consultants, this talk examines the ethics of publicly disclosing FL methods.
Abstract :
In recent years, popular interest in true crime has grown dramatically. No longer satisfied with staged re-enactments, modern-day lay CSI consumers frequently demand shockingly graphic depictions of real-life criminal offenses. From gang rape to child molestation, mass murder and group suicide, the public thirst for violent crime has become seemingly insatiable. So too has the layperson’s desire to discover the latest tools used by law enforcement to locate, arrest, and prosecute violent offenders. This drive for information has affected all branches of criminal science investigation, including forensic linguistics. As many a professional FL practitioner can attest, public curiosity in the newest methods used for the scientific analysis of linguistic evidence has grown significantly over the past two decades. This development has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, increased public understanding of the ways in which linguistic analyses may be applied to legal proceedings has commensurately raised public appreciation for the potential contributions of this specialized branch of applied linguistics. On the other hand, all this lay attention may also have compromised the ability of law enforcement officials to effectively apply these very same linguistic techniques without detection. The resulting conundrum would seem to pit the society’s right to remain informed about policing policies and practices against the responsibility of said authorities to protect citizens against criminal acts. The proposed presentation explores this ethical push-pull. Towards that end, this talk not only presents professional recommendations regarding the (ir)responsible use of linguistic data in applied settings. It also augments these oft theoretical guidelines with concrete practical insights gathered during anonymized interviews conducted with FL practitioners who have served as law enforcement consultants on authentic criminal cases. As this two-pronged approach will demonstrate, the public disclosure of previously confidential methods of FL analysis raises many uncomfortable yet critical ethical questions.
